I seem to have been added to the email list of a women’s ordination activist. From time to time I’ll get an amateurish graphic or a passage of shallow theology speak from this guy. I don’t argue with him because I’ve learned that arguing with ideologues is a waste of time, but as far as I can remember this is what the latest mumbo jumbo consisted of something like this:
God is not male and not patriarchal
Before he was incarnate God the Son was not male and not patriarchal
The Holy Spirit is not male and not patriarchal
Therefore the church is not patriarchal and should ordain women.
I call this Gnostic Nonsense because the gnostics were those early heretics who were “spiritual but not religious”. This self indulgent sentimentality is abhorrent. It exchanges the solid, concrete, dogmatic rock of the Catholic religion for vague, saccharine, feel good spirituality. I call it “Coca Cola Catholicism”–a sweet tasting, bubbly confection with no nutritional value that doesn’t actually quench your thirst and may become addictive.
How to answer this theological sleight of hand? Yes, yes, we all agree that God does not have a penis and xy chromosomes. But God the Son did and he was ascended into heaven so we must admit that in some mysterious way the physical realities are now part of the spiritual realm. Which leads to an interesting speculation: how and in what way and to what extent is heaven “physical”?
We know the supernatural realm is not physical like this temporal realm is physical and mortal, but we should not therefore imagine the spiritual realm as spiritual in some sort of ethereal, ghostly or ectoplasmic way. When we try to imagine the spiritual realm as “pure spirit” we end up thinking either of a bottle of gin or, as C.S.Lewis quipped as “a vast tapioca pudding in the sky.”
Lewis was right, as he speculated in The Great Divorce that the afterlife is not less physical, but more physical. Remember how the departed soul found the apples in heaven too heavy to lift and the blades of grass punctured his feet? St Therese of Lisieux had a similar insight when she said, “In heaven every grain of dust is a diamond.”
With respect to God then, we must posit that he IS in fact male. Jesus reveals God as “Our Father” so in some way there is a masculinity to God’s character–a masculinity that, of course, transcends our puny masculinity. As heaven is not less physical but MORE physical, so God’s masculinity is not less than our own, but more than our own. In fact theologians who are wiser than both me and my occasional emailer would try to explain that God’s masculinity embraces, includes and transcends both male and female-ness. That is why, by the way, Genesis says that both Adam and Eve were created in his image and that this is reflected in the male having both X and Y chromosomes and the female two X. Does this also explain why the sexual identity of men is often more complicated and often ambiguous than that of women?
Patriarchy is therefore not only written into the genetic code of the Christian religion. It is written into the genetic code of the cosmos.
Christians should thus beware of every attempt to negate the natural God-given gender differences. Women’s ordination? Nope.
The reason I stress this is not secret misogyny, but remembering Hilaire Belloc’s observation, “All arguments are theological arguments”. Women’s ordination is a product of feminism which seeks to negate the complementarity of the sexes and promote (in Phyllis Zagano’s wording) a “single nature anthropology”. In other words–no distinctions between men and women. This vague, wishy washy, beige religion is repugnant. It is lukewarm and should be spat out.
Well put. Giving and thanksgiving. Progenitor and responder. The music of the spheres.